iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

How do people feel about "colon titles" for science articles? I find them increasingly gimmicky and often vacuous. I recommend against them to students and mentees but maybe I am too old-school?

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The Barfbow in-the-browser app is now available at this URL evolvwing.github.io/barfbow/ Fun tool to create custom color palettes, give it a try!

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Great quote. In a recent piece Morizot also reminds us that "environment" is a derivative of "environ" : french / old french for "surroundings". Our language tends to make nature a foreign entity, at the skirts of civilization, when it actually permeates us.

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

here is a nice example with 8, slightly muted colors (chroma 40%) Normally, should avoid yellow-green for accessibility but here the brightness contrast makes it potentially ok 01a02046-79f7-61d5-c91b-740e77c7a252.share.connect.posit.cloud?n=8&h_orbits...

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

for example, a slight clockwise rotation results in a palette that has significantly more chromatic contrast for "green-blind" (deuteranopia/nomaly) readers. There is red and yellow, but VARYING BRIGHTNESS IS KEY

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

#dataviz example of how brighness shifts w/ Barfbow can craft more readable & accessible color palettes If you rotate this palette (initial hue, h1), most of these 4-color palettes are neat and colorblind friendly 01a02046-79f7-61d5-c91b-740e77c7a252.share.connect.posit.cloud?n=4&h_orbits...

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

a bit friendlier to the colorblind: 01a02046-79f7-61d5-c91b-740e77c7a252.share.connect.posit.cloud?n=16&h_orbit...

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Here is a very decent replacement to the 16 ggplot2 default colors that plague the literature. And if you don't love them you can tweak it with Barfbow. Varying brightness (Luminance) is key 01a02046-79f7-61d5-c91b-740e77c7a252.share.connect.posit.cloud?n=16&h_orbit...

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Check out the Barfbow app for a little promenade on color domes. Save your custom color palettes. Use variable brightness and colorblind-simuations to improve effective com, accessibility and scientific accuracy in figures. 01a02046-79f7-61d5-c91b-740e77c7a252.share.connect.posit.cloud

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

we've been shortcutting these by taking the Doors of Zotero and Mines of GoogleDocs But beware of the Balrog of Collaborator Edits there

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

🎶Rabbithole Fields foreeeeever 🎶

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Some essential insect embryology tricks in this! by @marchalfon.bsky.social

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Was Odysseus' holy moly antidote properties based on the counteracting effect of snowdrops on Datura poisoning www.ovid.com/jnls/clinica...

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Suggestions - Delete the 1% entire thing asap. Sorry. - Use the concept of Hidden Gems instead as framed in your white paper, to highlight papers that were published in journals ranked lower than what they deserved. This category is exactly where your quantitative metric can have a positive impact

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Recently we wanted to compile all the papers that did a knock-out or knock-down of the genes white and scarlet in arthropods With Pubmed and Google, I found it really hard. Piece of cake with Scholar Labs though.

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

That has not happened to me yet! Let's see... I like searches in the form of "articles that use [technique X] in [taxon B]" example below. The context boxes are helpful. A pubmed search of "RB-TnSeq wilt" only returns Georgoulis 2021

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Google Scholar Labs has recently transformed how I look for literature, highly recommended scholar.google.com/scholar_labs...

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

friendly reminder that red-green is BAD, don't do it

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

this is nicely tunable for example, I adjusted the luminance range here

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

quick update, barfbow now has a mode for making two-color divergent palettes. Ideal for heatmaps, like this global_warming example

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

last but not least, pls remember that while 1 person out of 25 has a form of color-vision deficiency, varying brightness is helpful. The tool helps to find sweet spots that maintain luminance contrast. normal vs deuteranopia color wheel:

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

side note: you can make palettes with monochromatic brightness gradients

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

note : you can change the size of the steps in hues (walk around this dome), the rate at which the brightness changes (going up and down the dome, and shift between blocks of vivid vs muted colors (chroma).

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

it's also quite fun to use it to make "scientific color maps" that have uniform brightness gradients, in the spirit of the excellent article "The misuse of colour in science communication" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

this, for example, can be used to replace the default colors of ggplot2 as below, which do are hard to distinguish for everyone (and particularly bad for people with a color vision-deficiency)

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

it's pretty good at making categorical palettes that maximizes both chromatic and luminance contrast for a defined N.

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

introducing barfbow, a little tool that aims to encourage the use of variable brightness to improve effective com, accessibility and scientific accuracy in figures. github.com/evolvwing/ba... If you need palettes with colors that are easy to distinguish on a plot or map, pls check it out!

visual output from barfbow, a Python tool to generate OKLCh color palettes with varying brightness, including an example of generated palett, plus color-vision simulations, monochrome rendering, named swatches, and OKLCh walk wheels.

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Hasbro who owns a variety of world-building franchises committed to not use generative AI for creating final art. Which reminded me how much I love the art behind Magic the Gathering. And Jolly Gerbils in particular, this card is a whole vibe.

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Arnaud Martin @evolvwing.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Posting a screen shot here cause I don't want to give them traffic but they're on these other platforms. Makes me want to poke hot knives in my orbits